


Sunshine

by x_los



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (1963)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-10-26
Updated: 2008-10-26
Packaged: 2017-11-23 01:13:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,795
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/616441
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/x_los/pseuds/x_los
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eradicating a centuries-long infatuation is difficult, but there <i>are</i> ways.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sunshine

Title: Sunshine  
Rating: PG-13  
Author: [](http://x-los.livejournal.com/profile)[](http://x-los.livejournal.com/)**x_los**  
Pairing/Characters: Seven/Ainley!Master  
Prompt: revised from [](http://best-enemies.livejournal.com/profile)[](http://best-enemies.livejournal.com/)**best_enemies** ' kink meme  
Beta: [](http://aralias.livejournal.com/profile)[](http://aralias.livejournal.com/)**aralias** , who had Thoughts on commas  
Summary: Eradicating a centuries-long infatuation is difficult, but there _are_ ways.

“I’m sorry,” the man in black tells the Doctor, and that alone is damning, “but I’m afraid I don’t. Not even faintly.”

“This is some trick,” the Doctor sneers. He’s less convinced that it is one by the minute, but he needs it not to be true. “What exactly are you up to, hm?”

“At the moment, I’m conquering the system,” the Master says with no shame, arching an eyebrow. “Quite effectively, if I do say so myself. At least I _was_ , until you barged into my TARDIS and started insinuating things I’ve no memory of, without any evidence to support your ridiculous claims that you're someone I should consider important.” The Master crosses his arms over his black suit and grey waistcoat, pausing to flick a speck off his jacket sleeve, and the Doctor is floored. When he’s in the room the Master’s attention swivels to him, just as the Doctor’s does to him. He’d never make such an indeliberate gesture as ignoring his oldest rival to attend to a bit of lint.

“I’m the _Doctor_.” He says it with what’s meant to be his usual air of declaration, but it tastes like a plea in his mouth, and it lingers between them with the stale pressure of desperation.

“So you’ve said. Are you going to leave of your own volition, or do I have to kill you? Only I’m rather busy at the moment, and disposing of bodies can be such a time consuming process.”

“You don’t know me at all,” the Doctor swallows, “You’re being perfectly honest for once, aren’t you, Master?” He fiddles with his umbrella, running a nervous palm over the smooth curve of the question mark handle, not knowing what to do with his hands—and how strange that is. In the Master’s company he’s always too busy with a hundred other thoughts to feel awkward in his own body.

“That _is_ what I’ve been trying to tell you.” The Master seems more amused than exasperated. “So either you’re lying to me as part of some intriguingly complicated ruse, and I truly have never met you before in my life, or someone has been tampering with my memories.” At this the Master pulls a sour face. He intensely dislikes the thought that his mind might not be absolutely impregnable.

“No,” the Doctor’s eyes narrow, “no, I suspect that’s not quite the case. Give yourself a little credit, Master. You know exactly how good a psychic you are, the strength of your defenses. Given that and what I might perceive as a motive, I suspect you did this to yourself.”

The Master scoffs outright. “Ripping out my own memories? _Lobotomizing_ myself? While perhaps possible, it sounds somewhat out of character. I’m beginning to think you don’t know me after all.”

“Oh, but there are certainly ways of achieving it, aren’t there?” the Doctor ponders. “I can think of half a dozen means of forgetting a person you’ve known for what amounts to your entire lives. You were always more interested in that sort of mental phenomenon, but until this minute I would have bet practically anything, that you wouldn’t have ever elected them.”

“And yet you seem to understand why I might.” The Master folds his arms and leans back against the console. “How very interesting. One might almost say your chagrin implies that you could have given me just cause.” The Master smirks: the look hasn’t changed an iota. The Doctor feels a very little like he might throw up. “Guilty conscience, Doctor?” The Master is observing the seasick cast to the Doctor’s face with some prurient interest.

“Think back,” the Doctor hisses, “and name your school friends.”

He does. Theta doesn’t merit a mention. The Master looks almost confused for an instant, eyes flickering uncertainly, when the Doctor asks if he remembers putting itching power in all Borusa’s collars, programming the Academy’s information servers to imply rude things about the Houses of those who attempted to access them, the dramatic meteor shower he’d seen and been struck with as a child, who he lived with when he’d been allowed to choose, where he’d been the day his mother died.

“Some of it does sound half familiar,” the Master admits, grudging and bewildered.

The Doctor doesn’t know if exerting this pressure is wise. The Master, free of his long-succored rage against the Doctor, might well be driven by less hate. Perhaps he’ll be less of a threat to the universe like this. But then, unhampered by his dominant obsession, he could also be a more effective killer. The Master has always known that every crime, every murder, drives the Doctor, who is perhaps his ultimate goal, further away from him. Will release from that awareness make him crueler or saner? Everything is a dangerously unsettled question, and in this regeneration the Doctor finds chaos unnerving. The Doctor should do what this regeneration of himself does best: step back and think calmly. Access the situation and plan for it.

But the Doctor is a person as well as a collection of interests and responsibilities. He can’t think past how much the blank, detached politeness in the Master’s manner revolts him. He needs the Master whole and proper—he _needs_ the Master to recognize him. If the Master’s done some abomination to his own mind, then it’s only a kindness to fix him. The Doctor begins to tell himself that what he’s known he was going to do since he accepted that the Master was telling the truth could be—no, _must_ be an act of charity. Which feels better. More rational. The Master’s only done what he always does: made a stupid, rash, willful decision and carried it out with his ungodly cleverness to its terrible conclusion. The Doctor is fixing it. Mending him. That’s as it should be.

What isn’t as it should be at all is the Master, tilting his head at him, studying him objectively. “Some kind of lover,” he pronounces.

“What makes you say that?” the Doctor asks, challenging the process by which the Master came to his conclusion instead of denying it.

The Master chuckles, low and rolling. “What else could possibly have made me do something as monumentally eviscerating as what you’re suggesting?” Dubiously, he sniffs at the Doctor’s diminutive stature and unprepossessing hat. “I must have cared about you a great deal.”

The Doctor shuts his eyes, briefly. When he opens them again, he finds the Master examining him more carefully, as if to determine what exactly it was about this Doctor that he must have found so destructively fascinating.

“Black holes,” the Doctor helps him.

“Hm?” The Master pauses, looks him directly in the eye.

“You can’t see the thick, burned heart at the centre. You can’t see the massive gravity. But you can feel it ripping at you. And you can see it destroying whole systems—you can watch it bend and then break light, and space, and time itself. That’s how you know its nature. That’s how you come to understand its strength. And it’s horrible, obviously—it’s a force of destruction. All that majesty, and it’s never once turned to creation.

“It rips whole worlds to shreds, and there’s nothing you can do to alter, or to stop it, though your whole life is spent in trying. And it’s grotesque. But it’s sublime. There’s nothing more powerful. More hideous. More beautiful.” The Doctor stares at him, unashamed, though in the back of his mind he understands that he will be, and very soon. The addendum is unnecessary, but he can’t stop himself. “That’s what kind.”

The Master is staring at him, and there is something a little like terror in his eyes. The Doctor knows he’s done it, because Koschei looked at Theta like that the first time he fell in love with him, across a millennia and more bodies than the Doctor cares to count. It’s more than shared history between them: it’s who they are.

“I should kill you,” the Master says at last, “for doing that. For not allowing me this. I _had_ someone,” and if the Doctor thinks that’s a subtle shock, a light boil to the blood, it’s no preparation for the smothered sentence that comes next, “and I thought I might come to actually—oh, how I must _hate_ you.”

The Master walks him to the wall, and nearly snaps the Doctor’s wrist with his sudden grip. He shoves the Doctor’s hand up to his forehead in an unspoken order to fix him. “I expect you know your way around,” he sneers, and the Doctor is plunged without warning or preparation into the Master’s suddenly open mind and, like a drowning man fighting his way up towards the surface for air, he’s struggling, untangling the knots around whole areas of the Master’s brain, because it’s all he _can_ do, here.

It takes some time. The Master’s mental work has always been defter than his. These knots had to be made exceptionally complex to contain their contents. The Doctor is not insulted by the will involved in the work he’s undoing, the determination to annihilate the very thought of him, the mere idea of him. That would be childish, and he can’t afford it.

When he emerges the Master is looking at him with a tender, closed loathing, and so the Doctor knows he’s managed it. The Master turns away abruptly, and the Doctor, unaided, stumbles after him into a stark bedroom. He can tell it’s not the Master’s own, just something the TARDIS cooked up. That’s a crafted snub, but the Doctor is too exhausted to comment or care. The Master faces the mirror, taking off his cufflinks.

“Undress,” he says to the Doctor, and it isn’t close to a suggestion.

The Doctor hesitates.

“I believe you know,” the Master says, tone stark as the room, “how very deeply you owe me.”

For once the experience isn’t sublime and powerful and hideous and beautiful. It’s sad. As sad as realizing the star you observe in the night sky is long deceased, and the light you love is its walking corpse. Every constellation a morgue. Every wish made morbid.

Every thrust is a defeat. Every gasp a death rattle. They come undone, are left boneless and exhausted and pitiful as decaying bodies. The Doctor wishes their fucking were the starlight of something long gone. Eventually the light of dead stars is allowed the luxury of fading. The easing into death. But he knows neither of them is that lucky.


End file.
